Review: ‘The Conspiracy’

Dedicated to the proposition that even paranoids can have real enemies, "The Conspiracy" is a modesty suspenseful faux documentary that asks us to consider whether street-corner ranters who issue dire warnings might actually be on to something.

Dedicated to the proposition that even paranoids can have real enemies, “The Conspiracy” is a modesty suspenseful faux documentary that asks us to consider whether street-corner ranters who issue dire warnings might actually be on to something. Filmmaker Christopher MacBride makes the most of an obviously limited budget while constructing a provocative drama about documentarians who keep digging after their subject, an obsessed conspiracy theorist, inexplicably disappears. Pic could find receptive auds on home-screen platforms.

Two documakers (Aaron Poole, Jim Gilbert) are fascinated by Terrance (Alan Peterson), a zealot who’s highly skeptical of “official” explanations, and claims that society is controlled by a secret cadre of string pullers. When he vanishes, the filmmakers continue to probe, questioning other obsessed skeptics — including a few real-life conspiracy buffs cast as themselves — while connecting the dots to the Tarsus Club, a cabal that surreptitiously causes “very real and tangible shifts” in global governmental and monetary policies. Things take a borderline-silly turn at a hush-hush Tarsus gathering that resembles a witches’ coven, but this intriguing picture fortunately stops short of going over the top.